This week, another bombshell dropped illuminating the true financial nature of the man currently occupying the White House. Donald Trump isn’t a wholly self-made model of wealth — he’s a scam artist, having benefited from more outside help than he let on, which he engaged in tax schemes to hide even while losing, it’s now been revealed, over a billion dollars in the course of a decade. CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta dragged the president through the mud over these revelations, and more specifically, his response to them. In short, Trump didn’t specifically rebuff a single piece of the reporting, instead touting the mess as some kind of grand scheme and deriding reporters as peddling “fake news” with their illumination of it.
Acosta observed:
‘Trump admits to racking up massive business losses, avoiding paying taxes, and treating the practice as “sport,” but says reporters are “fake news” for revealing the truth.’
Trump had shared, in part:
‘You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes….almost all real estate developers did – and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport.’
Although Trump claims to have just been doing what everybody else did in claiming his massive losses, the real picture is more complicated. In at least 1990 and 1991, Trump reported losses that were more than double those of the taxpayer closest behind him — he was literally doing the worst of any businessperson in the United States in terms of the sheer volume of his spiraling assets. In both of those years, he claimed losses of some $250 million, although Trump claims that “much” of what’s in question was “non-monetary.”
The reporting is yet another notch against the idea that Trump’s doing great and always has been — there have been a cascade of revelations about fraud the president has seemed to engage in that have culminated in investigations inside and outside of Congress. He’s inflated and deflated the values of his assets at will, worked to avoid taxes through other means like shell corporations, and beyond.
House Democrats are continuing their efforts to obtain some of the president’s tax returns to examine these issues even after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin delivered them the legally questionable at best notification this week that he didn’t intend to produce the documents. The law states that his office “shall” do so under request from the House Ways and Means Committee — it’s pretty cut and dry.
Check out Twitter’s response to Acosta pointing out Trump’s behavior…
Featured Image via screenshot
